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Some Reflections on Newton's 'Principia' Some Reflections on Newton’s ‘Principia’ E B Davies 1 February 2005 Abstract We examine the text of Principia to discover the extent to which New- ton’s claims about his own contribution to it were justified. We argue that the general Scholium, written twenty six years after the first edition, sub- stantially misrepresents the main body of the text for polemical reasons. We discuss papers of Wallis, Wren and Huygens that use the third law of motion, as stated by Newton in Book 1. We also argue that Newton’s use of induc- tion has been misunderstood by many twentieth century commentators, who have confused it with the very different notion due to Hume. 1 Introduction This paper has two related goals. The first is to discuss comments that Newton made in Principia about his own contribution and about the contributions of others. There are not many of these, but they reveal remarkable inconsistencies between the main text, the General Scholium, and what is known on the basis of Newtonian scholarship since 1960. We also discuss a variety of comments about Principia by some later scientists and philosophers, which indicate the degree to which they were reacting to each other rather than to the original text. The relationship between Newton’s comments about his own contribution to Prin- cipia and what is revealed by careful analysis is complicated, and it is best to distinguish between the main text and the General Scholium, composed twenty six years after the first edition had appeared. We consider that for the most part Newton represents his personal contribution to the material in Principia fairly in the main text. On the other hand his comments about the contributions of his 1 predecessors often used words such as ‘others’, and on some occasions were mislead- ing, often by omission. We describe in some detail articles of Wallis and Huygens, whom he names along with Wren in the Axioms preceding Book 1, [P, p 424]. We also argue that the General Scholium was a polemical work, which substantially misrepresents the contents of the main text. We avoid using the terms ‘Newton’s theory/method/style’. Books 1 and 3 discuss two different topics, which we will call his Dynamics and his Gravitation. These are treated in very different manners, and it does not make sense to talk about ‘Newton’s method’ as if he applied the same method to both of them. We use the word ‘Commentators’ below to refer to people in the twentieth century who should have read Principia before commenting on it (but might not have), but who did not have access to the huge flowering of Newtonian scholarship since 1960. We also include some later people who had not fully absorbed the impli- cations of this Newtonian scholarship. The Commentators in our sense do not include Poincar´eand Einstein, who remarked that many nineteenth scientists were misled by a continental tradition that presented Newtonian mechanics in a more formal and less experimentally based style than did Principia; [8, 12]. Among the Commentators one must include Popper, still cited by scientists as one of the most important philosophers of science in the twentieth century. (Philosophers in general are less enthusiastic about his contributions.) Another Commentator, the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar, rewrote Books 1 and 3 in 1995 in modern notation, providing his own proofs for the benefit of ‘the common reader’ – a scientist who did not wish to wade through the archaic language and highly geometric argu- ments in Principia; [1]. We discuss Chandrasekhar’s comments about ‘Newtonian’ relativity below. The first language of many of the Commentators was by no means always English, so one cannot assume that they used the Motte translation of 1729. Accordingly we feel free to use the recent translation by Cohen and Whitman (pp. 371-944 in [3]) in the hope that it is the closest to the Latin original. We use the letter ‘P’ to denote this translation. We distinguish between what might be concluded by a conscientious reader of Principia who did not have access to Newton’s private papers and the results of recent Newtonian scholarship by confining many of our comments on the latter to footnotes. 2 2 Newton’s Dynamics We use this term to mean the detailed mathematical development in Book 1, based on the three Laws of Motion in the previous passage, called ‘Axioms, or the Laws of Motion’; [P, p 416,417]. Newton calls this rational mechanics [P, p382] and states unambiguously [P, p424 top] that he is not claiming credit for these laws, which he adopts from earlier authors; we discuss this is more detail below.1 One of the most controversial items in Principia is Definition 5 before Book 1. This states Centripetal force is the force by which bodies are drawn from all sides, are impelled, or in any way tend, toward some point as a center. One force of this kind is gravity, by which bodies tend toward the center of the earth ... [P, p405]. Newton’s definition makes the assumption (or hypothesis) that it is reasonable to describe gravitation in such a manner, even if the ultimate explanation for the force needs a separate investigation. In the General Scholium he states Thus far I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity. [P, p 943] In other words Newton was separating explanation from description. This was a regressive approach by the standards of the time, and was wholly rejected by a number of his contempraries,2 but it proved extremely important in the future development of physics.3 Newton justifies his discussion of the concept of force in [P, p. 419,420]. He states 1On the basis of the effort that Newton put into formulating his Definitions and Laws of Motion, as evidenced by his many drafts of ‘De Motu’, [17, pp. 409-420], one would conclude that this was extraordinary generosity on the part of Newton, otherwise one of the most ungenerous individuals imaginable. But it appears that others accepted his account. For example when Halley reviewed Newton’s Principia, he passed over the three laws of Motion as ‘necessary Praecognita’ without comment.[9] This suggests he did not regard Newton’s contribution to these as major. 2Huygens, Leibniz and others objected to the very idea that one might accept the existence of remotely acting forces, and insisted that bodies could only act on each other while in contact; for them this made Descartes’ scheme of vortices plausible even if currently inaccurate, and Newton’s ideas about gravitation a non-starter. 3Almost no physicist today thinks that we have an explanation of the laws of quantum me- chanics, and many do not even think that we should expect to get one in the future. Nevertheless our mathematical description of how it works is extremely detailed and highly successful. 3 [Corollary 2] can be used very extensively, and the variety of its appli- cations clearly shows its truth, since the whole of mechanics – demon- strated in different ways by those who have written on this subject – depends upon what has just now been said. He enumerates applications to a variety of machines. These fall within the field that we call Statics, and have no connection with Law 2, which is a part of Dynamics. There are extensive commentaries on the first two laws,4 but much less has been written about Law 3. If one examines Principia one finds a statement that appears not to have been discussed in any detail by Cohen or Whiteside.5 In [P, p 424, bottom] Newton identifies Wallis, Wren and Huygens as having used Law 3 to find the rules of the collisions and reflections of hard bodies, and states that they com- municated their results to the Royal Society and then published them. He is surely referring to articles that they submitted to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in November 1668, December 1668 and January 1669 respectively; see [16, 10]. None of these contains experimental data: they are summaries of the results of even earlier investigations. Wallis uses the laws, without writing them down, to perform a series of calculations algebraically. In item 4, he writes the formula VT = PL for the momentum6 V of a single body, where T is the time, P the weight7 and L the distance. In item 5 he writes down the formula C = L=T for the speed (‘Celeritas’), which he then uses in item 6 to derive V = PC. In 4A version of Law 1 appears in Descartes’ ‘Principia Philosophiae’ of 1644, but Newton went to some lengths not to mention Descartes’ name in Principia. Cohen states that Newton learned it from Descartes [3, p109], but this does not imply that Descartes was the first to understand the law. Similar statements can be traced into antiquity, becoming less related to experimental test as one goes back in time. 5Cohen’s discussion of Law 3 in [3, p 117,118] is very brief and starts with a quotation of Mach’s ‘The Science of Mechanics’. Cohen appears to accept Mach’s claim that this Law was discovered by Newton himself, and makes no comment about the attribution by Newton. In [4, p. 68] Cohen repeats the comment about Mach, does now refer to Newton’s comments concerning Wallis and Huygens, but does not mention Wren nor that Newton gave a precise reference to the journal in which he claimed that all three used Law 3.
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